Egg coffee at Giang Caf 0069n Hanoi is served in a bowl of hot water to keep its temperature.

Well, that’s a piece of cake, given that Hanoi is the capital city of a country that is the world’s second-largest coffee exporter. You can easily find several coffee shops on each of the city’s hundreds of small streets.

But finding egg coffee in a shop whose history dates back to French colonial times is a different story.

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Giang Café is humbly hidden on a small lane on Nguyen Huu Huan Street in the city’s old quarter. It may be difficult to find for visitors, but it is well worth the effort. It continues to be hugely popular among Hanoi’s coffee addicts with its special ca phe trung, or egg coffee.

Giang Café was founded by Mr. Nguyen Giang in 1946, when he was working as a bartender for the famous five-star Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi hotel. Although the café has been relocated twice, its egg coffee recipe is almost the same as in its early days, with its chief ingredients being chicken egg yolk, Vietnamese coffee powder, sweetened condensed milk, butter and cheese.

The coffee is brewed in a small cup with a filter before the addition of a well-whisked mixture of the yolk and other ingredients. The cup is placed in a bowl of hot water to keep its temperature.

Mr. Giang’s son, Nguyen Tri Hoa, says his father developed the recipe in days when milk was scarce in Vietnam. He used egg yolks to replace milk.

“We want to offer a kind of drink with the bitterness of pure coffee together with the mild and pleasant taste from the fluffiness of the whisked yolk and its protein…. And people here love it, especially on a cold day,” Mr. Hoa said.

Vu Trong Khanh/The Wall Street Journal

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Mr. Hoa said the coffee beans are carefully selected from growers in central Vietnam. He roasts the beans himself without using any additives to keep the pure flavor of the coffee. Meanwhile, he chooses eggs grown by households outside of Hanoi, avoiding eggs from large chicken farms where industrial feed is often used.

“In the old days, when electric egg beaters were not available, our customers had to whisk the eggs by themselves, using a tool made from bamboo sticks,” Mr. Hoa said. “Some used to spend up to 30 minutes to beat their eggs before they could drink the coffee.”

Coffee has now become one of Vietnam’s key agricultural products and export earners, after it was first introduced into the country in the middle of the 19th century by the French. Vietnam has exported 1.37 million tons of coffee valued at $2.92 billion so far in the 2012-13 crop year ending Sept. 31. With Vietnam’s rapid urbanization, backed by an economic growth averaging 7% a year over the past decade, new coffee shops, including Starbucks, have been opening throughout the country. But Mr. Hoa said he will keep Giang Café small and simple, as it has always been.

“Many of my customers have been coming here regularly for up to 20 or 30 years. And we have also seen more and more young people coming to drink our egg coffee. But we have no plan to expand our business,” Mr. Hoa said. “People enjoy coffee by all senses. So a quiet and simple place will work.”

Several other coffee shops in Hanoi have also started offering egg coffee with different styles and prices, giving the curious an opportunity to decide which is best.

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Indonesia Real Time provides analysis and insight into the region, which includes Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines, Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and Brunei. Contact the editors at SEAsia@wsj.com.

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